have changed over time, if you look at all the nominations from 1900 through 1976, the end of gerry ford's administration, the average supreme court nomination took about 20 days between nomination and confirmation. almost 80% of these nominations were confirmed within a month, and almost 40% were confirmed within less than ten days. if carter didn't have any nominations, but if you look at from reagan on, the shortest nomination was sandra day o'connor. she took 37 days. but the average was about 77 days. so you go from slightly over 20 days average to an average of about 77 days in those two periods. then you had confirmations as long as robert bork's which took 114 days. so it's a fairly dramatic change that happened over time. let me just show you some numbers for circuit and district court nominees. these go from the beginning of the carter administration through the end of obama's first term. last year in 2012. and you can see the squares are for district courts, the diamond shapes are for district courts, and you can see by congress how they're bouncing around, being around 60 or so